“梦想时期”摄影系列

Playing with the Future

Korean-French-German Symposium + Hackathon on Digital Economy

In the digital age, the value of many companies depends more on the number of their users than on the material goods they produce: the more clicks and the more "likes", the higher the value of a company.

What impact does this phenomenon have on individual consumers, players and "clickers"? How have value added and the market value of products and companies changed in the digital age? A whole generation of digital consumers contribute to through their clicks and likening to the value of large companies, which in their turn do not have to employ a large number of employees anymore. Is there to be a new digital proletariat, which does not bend over spinning wheels and machines, but is chained to screens and keyboards - to take up the Marxian idea of alienation and to think about it further? Or are we facing a new, utopian digital age of "sharing," where the consumer is a "prosument" (Jeremy Rifkin), embedded in a boundless network of a reciprocal society of sharing?

In a tri-national symposium, these questions are to be discussed with thinkers from Korea, France and Germany. From the areas of sociology, design, and communication science, renowned researchers give insights into the current discourse on digital economics. Participants from Germany are Florian Schmidt, Ph.D. (Hochschule für Künste, Bremen, Germany) and Dr. Sebastian Sevignani (Friedrich Schiller University of Jena). The results and findings of the symposium are the starting point for a hackathon (word composition from "to hack" and "marathon"). A team composed of hackers from Seoul National University, the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers and gamelab.berlin will produce a software product on two consecutive days. There is no limit to their creativity. The podium guests will comment on the results of the hackathon - and return to the initial questions of the symposium.